Christians think we are creatures that beg. Prayer is the activity that most defines who we are. Through prayer we learn the patience to take the time to beg, to beg to the One alone who is the worthy subject of such prayer. Through prayer Christians learn how to beg from each other. Christians, therefore, can never be at peace with a politics or economic arrangements built on the assumption that we are fundamentally not beggars.
~ Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, 241.
I came across this passage from Hauerwas about a year ago, and I've been turning it around in my mind since then. I imagine that those of us who are situated comfortably within liberal discourse about “human rights” might find this quotation a little upsetting. Indeed, if the language of “rights” tells us anything it tells us this: we are not beggars — we are entitled to life, freedom, happiness, and so much more. Therefore, one begins to see the way in which the language of “human rights” goes hand in hand with the political and economic structures of capitalism and rugged individualism. Operating from within a paradigm of entitlement, the question becomes “how much can I have?” or, better yet, “how much do I deserve?” And we only ever need a little convincing to conclude that we surely deserve more than we have right now.
However, if Christianity teaches us to understand ourselves as beggars, and teaches us to act accordingly, then Hauerwas is surely correct to suggest such an understanding would radically rework the political and economic arrangements of the Christian community (and it is important to emphasise that we are speaking of the Christian community here. As Christians we are seeking to model an alternative to the social order, not impose a more Christian structure on society — the sooner we realise this, the sooner we may be able to see that capitalism doesn't have to be considered “the best of all the bad options we have”). Furthermore, Hauerwas is also correct to emphasise that prayer teaches us to beg — both from God and from others. I suspect that anyone who has gone through times of material hardship quickly learns how closely connected these two types of begging are. I think of some of friends that panhandle — sure, they ask God to provide their daily bread, but that doesn't stop them asking strangers for change. I also think of when I first committed myself to getting through school without going into debt. Sure, I asked for God to help me, but I also quickly learned to beg from others in times of need. And this is precisely what prayer should teach us — to rely on God and the people of God.
Therefore, if Christians are those who know themselves to be beggars, then the Christian community should become a space where it is okay to beg. It should be a space where beggars are not shamed but welcomed. Of course, once such a safe space is created, we will all be able to admit our own needs — for all of us have such needs in our lives. However, we are usually too ashamed, too driven by pressures that tell us we need to be independent, and too driven by our own pride, to admit this. Creating a space where begging is welcomed, creates an honest space where we all are welcomed as we are — and not just as we try to appear to be. Indeed, this is what it means to be a part of a community that proclaims the forgiveness of sins. By allowing others (and ourselves) the space to beg, we create the room for confession and absolution in all the nitty-gritty parts of our lives.
And this, of course, flows out into the economic aspects of our lives (how can it not?). Allowing the structures of capitalism to dictate the economics of a community of beggars is fatal — because capitalism has no use for beggars. In fact, beggars are marginalised, jailed, or left to die precisely because beggars, by their very existence, challenge the validity of capitalism. Therefore, if Christians are to come to believe that capitalism is the only viable economic option for their communities, then they have already submitted themselves to that which seeks their destruction. Of course, by speaking in this way I am not suggesting that capitalism is out killing Christians (although it should probably be noted that capitalism is doing that too, just not usually in our neighbourhoods), rather what I mean is that surrendering to capitalism in this way is fatal to both our identity as Christians and our ability to act meaningfully as Christians within our contemporary situation.
Therefore, if Christian communities are to exist in a genuinely Christian way — as communities of beggars — then we must demonstrate a political and economic way of living that is different than the structures of capitalism. And, since we are prayer-shaped beggars, this will lead us to develop a communal (i.e. political) economics of radical sharing and equally radical dependence… but more on that later.

This is a copy of my notes for a sermon I preached a few months ago. I always have mixed feelings about posting such things since what I write, and what I end up saying, often don't match-up very well — plus there is something that occurs in a public dialogue that really can't be captured on paper. Regardless, I like to keep some sort of record of these things.
Intro: The story so far…
• Luke’s gospel is supposed to be good news, after all that’s what “gospel” means.
• In particular, it is supposed to be good news to the poor. Thus, in Jesus’ first act of public teaching he announces what today would be considered his “mission statement.” This is what he says:
o The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, because he anointed me to preach good news to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favourable year of the LORD (Lk 4).
• Then, as we followed Jesus’ ministry, it really looked like all this good stuff was happening. Jesus was healing the sick, casting demons out of the possessed, empowering the marginalized, freeing the oppressed, and showing those who were rejected by the religious leaders as “sinners” that they were, in fact, God’s beloved children.
• It must have been terribly exciting for the disciples to watch. The disciples – who mostly consisted of people who were poor, and people who were rejected by the healthy, the wealthy, and the religious – watched all sorts of wonderful things occur. Yes, they thought, God has forgiven our sins, he has come back to heal us, to set us free, and to bless us.
• The disciples were a part of a people who were singing, “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel,” [I requested that we sing this song during worship] and in Jesus they thought Emmanuel had come and they thought that they were being set free. Free from the Roman military that persecuted them and taxed them, free from the religious leaders who rejected them and taxed them some more, and free from illness and demon possession.
• But then, everything goes terribly wrong. Jesus, who was supposed to save them from all these oppressive powers, ends up being defeated. The religious leaders capture him, condemn him and hand him over to the political leaders who beat him and crucify him. On the cross, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” but God doesn’t answer.
• So Jesus dies. The disciples thought he was going to set them all free, they had surrendered everything to follow Jesus, but at the end of the day, Jesus is crushed by the same powers that crush the poo and the sick and the “sinners.”
• Can we imagine how devastating this must be for them?
1. Lk 24.1-12: Something new has started…
• But then we get to the passage we’re looking at today and we hit a turning point – not just of the story, this is the turning-point of history. Something so dramatic, something so incredible, has occurred, that those of us who are used to hearing the story often forget just how crazy it all sounds.
• Keeping the story-so-far in mind, let’s read the passage trying to think like the characters in the story:
o But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, [the women] came to the tomb bringing the spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men suddenly stood near them in dazzling clothing; and as the women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living One among the dead? He is not here, but he has risen. Remember how he spoke to you while he was still in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.” And they remembered his words, and returned from the tomb and reported all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. Now they were Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James; also the other women with them were telling these things to the apostles. But these words appeared to them as nonsense, and they would not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen wrappings only; and he want away to his home, marveling at what had happened.
• So, what is going on here?
• Well, one thing is certain: we see a group of people who are certain that Jesus is dead. Everybody is sure that Jesus is defeated. Nobody at the time of Jesus was expecting a Messiah that would die and then be raised again to new life. And so the women go to the tomb, not because they expect or even hope to find it empty, but because they want to anoint Jesus’ dead body with burial spices.
• Of course, it is interesting to note that it is women who go to the tomb. Women, after all, were considered to be not-as-fully-human as men during the time of Jesus. Women were subservient to men, they did not have a lot of the rights and privileges that men had. Thus, Luke is continuing to demonstrate his interested in the marginalized. Whereas in the last few chapters we have seen the men betray Jesus (Judas), deny Jesus (Peter), and run away from Jesus (all the rest), it is the women who love Jesus enough that they follow him to the cross, and they are the one’s who love him enough to go out and anoint his dead body. Furthermore, they are those who are brave enough to go to Jesus’ tomb. After all, if Jesus was condemned, then those who followed him could face similar penalties – especially those who were close to him. However, while the male apostles hide away in their homes, the women have the courage to go to Jesus’ tomb.
• But they were sure that Jesus was dead. So it is no wonder that they are perplexed when they get to the tomb and find that it is empty. What has happened? Maybe somebody has broken into the tomb and stolen the body? Maybe, in their grief, they got confused about which tomb Jesus was buried in?
• You can, therefore, imagine their shock when the angels appear to them to tell them that Jesus is risen. However, it is important to notice that it is not the presence of the angels that is convincing. Rather, what convinces the women is the remembrance of what Jesus said. The empty tomb can only be understood as shockingly good news when it is understood in light of Jesus’ words and deeds prior to his death. As things play out with the women, remembrance brings understanding, which inspires new actions – without being told to do so, they rush back to tell the apostles the good news.
• But nobody believes them. In fact, in first-century Jewish society, women were never considered to be reliable witnesses. Thus, for example, if a person was being tried for a crime, and a woman witnessed the crime, her testimony would not be considered valid in a court of law. Because they are female, their story and their testimony is dismissed as hysterical babbling.
• Peter, however, at least goes to the tomb to check things out. But Peter doesn’t go into the tomb. He just looks in and ends up being puzzled because he says the linen that was wrapped around Jesus’ body. Why is he puzzled? Because he doesn’t believe that Jesus is risen. And so he probably wonders why the linens are there – after all, if somebody had stolen Jesus’ body they would probably not take the time to strip the body before removing it from the tomb. Peter, unlike the women, still doesn’t believe, and still doesn’t know what is going on. Like the rest of the apostles, he will need more proof before he gets what is going on.
2. Application: Victory, Fearless Love, Women, & Entering Empty Tombs
• So here we are, 2000 years later, and what are we supposed to make of all this? Well, I want to suggest that there are four key points – four pieces of good news – that we should take away from this. The first relates to the nature of the victory that Jesus won, the second relates to the role the women play in the story, the third relates to remembering these stories, and the fourth relates to entering the (empty) tomb.
• Victory: Luke’s gospel, like we said at the beginning, is supposed to be good news. Jesus was supposed to be setting people free – free from oppression, from sickness, from poverty, from rejection, from sin. And it looked like he was doing it. But then he was killed by the oppressors and by the wealthy and influential powers that make sure that the poor stay poor and that the sick die alone. So what happened?
• By choosing to go to the cross to die, Jesus reveals who the true enemy is. Jesus reveals that, ultimately, Sin, Death, and the Devil, are the true powers that lurk behind the political powers that oppress the poor, and behind the religious powers that reject those that they label as “sinners.” Thus, Jesus reveals that setting out to fight and conquer the Romans, or fight and conquer the religious leaders is focusing on the wrong enemy. Even if one defeats these people, one will still be enslaved because Sin, Death, and Devil are the true powers that perpetuate oppression, poverty, and illness. Thus, Jesus goes behind the religious and political powers to get to the root of things.
• And by getting to the root of things Jesus thus triumphs over all things! The resurrection of Jesus shows that he has conquered death, and by conquering death, he conquers sin (because death is the consequence of sin), and by conquering sin, he conquers the devil (who is powerless without sin and death). Thus, in Phil 2, Paul realizes that, through the cross and resurrection, Jesus becomes Lord of all. As he says:
o Because [Jesus] existed in the form of God, [he] did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself taking the form of a slave and being made in the likeness of humanity. Being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted him, and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
• Luke is hinting at this at when he writes that the women did not find the body of “the Lord Jesus” when they entered the tomb. Luke realizes that the tomb is empty because Jesus is Lord. This then shows that, even after the tragedy, we are receiving good news.
• Therefore, because of this good news, we no longer need to live in fear of our enemies. In fact, we don’t even need to fight our enemies; instead, we are empowered to resist our enemies by loving them. Because we are not afraid of our enemies, we can resist them and refuse to let them control us. And because Jesus, rather than sin and death, is our Lord, we can love our enemies.
• Even if our enemies hurt us, we know that they cannot triumph over us. We are the people of the resurrection. We know that even in our suffering, we are victorious.
• Thus Paul writes in Ro 8:
o Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written, “For your sake we are being put to death all day long; we were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through him who loved. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus or Lord.
• In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I love Mosaic, here, I feel like I’m getting a glimpse of resurrection happening all around me. We are all broken, like Jesus on the cross, but we are all being raised up and made new, like beautiful pieces of art.
• Being the Women: Now to turn to the second point: that Luke focuses on the women as the central characters of this story. As we mentioned before, women, in Jesus’ day, weren’t considered valid witnesses, and their testimony is dismissed. Therefore, the fact that only the women are witnesses to the empty tomb is quite significant.
• This fact is significant for us, because we at Mosaic are like the women in the story. We are not the kind of people who are in charge, we are not the sort of people who have a voice – either in society or in the rest of the church – in fact, we are the type of people who are ignored by society and abandoned by the rest of the church. We’re too poor, or too young, or too uneducated, or too old, or too rough, or just too broken to matter.
• But we learn from this passage that our voices matter. In fact, our voices are crucial – without the women’s testimony, we would never know about the empty tomb, and without our voices today, there’s a chance that many in both society and the church will never understand what it means to say that Jesus is Lord.
• Thus, in the midst of our brokenness, we bear witness to Jesus, and we embrace the things that make us insignificant because we believe that God is revealed in those very things. Paul understand this point, so he writes to the Corinthians:
o But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things – the things that are not – to nullify the things that are… [for God has said to me] “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong (1 Cor 1; 2 Cor 12).
• All that is needed is for us to, like the women, love Jesus enough, and be brave enough, to share this gospel with society, and with the parts of the church that have gotten so wealthy and comfortable that they have forgotten what the gospel is.
• And how do we do this? We do this be embracing our weakness. We embrace our brokenness, and our poverty and our insignificance; instead of trying to hide these things, we show that Jesus is risen because here, in the midst of our brokenness, power of resurrection is at work. This is surely good news for us!
• Entering the Tomb: This idea leads me to the next point: instead of being like Peter, who only looks into the tomb, we need to be like the women and enter the tomb. What do I mean by this?
• By this I mean that following Jesus doesn’t just stop at the point of coming to listen to his teachings. Following Jesus means following Jesus to the cross. And it means that we even go so far as to follow Jesus into the grave.
• This means that Christians are often completely wrong about the way in which they present Christianity. Christianity is often offered like some sort of spiritual prozac. We’re told: Come to Jesus and all your problems will go away, come to Jesus and everything will get better, come to Jesus and you’ll always be happy. But that’s not true. Following Jesus into the tomb means that when we follow Jesus, sometimes things don’t get better. In fact, sometimes following Jesus makes everything harder. That’s why Jesus is always warning people to count the cost before they decide to be his disciples. As it says earlier in Lk:
o Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, 'This fellow began to build and was not able to finish. Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14).
• It is true that we are resurrection people, but to be resurrection people we also need to be cross-shaped people.
• This will be the difference between people who actually follow Jesus and people who only admire Jesus. In our society, there are a lot of people who admire Jesus, there are a lot of people who think Jesus was a good person who said a lot of really nice things about love and peace and all that good stuff. However, there are only a small amount of people who actually follow Jesus down the road to the cross and into the tomb.
• Summation — victory, fearless love, becoming the women, and entering the tomb — and conclusion.

Just a quick note to say that I am back from my wedding/honeymoon, and I hope to resume blogging regularly in the next few days.
Grace and peace.

There is another way in which our practice needs to be better buttressed by our reading. For example, we often claim that our practice of nonviolent direct action is grounded in the symbolic action of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus, but rarely does our biblical study demonstrate how exactly this is the case.
~Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus, 12.
Myers, I think, points out one of the greatest weaknesses of Christian involvement in subversive socio-political and economic action. Simply put, Christians who desire to live counter-culturally too often uncritically adopt already present models of subversion, or protest, without thinking through those actions in light of what it means to live within the trajectory of the biblical narrative. Myers challenges us to think about how exactly the biblical narrative leads us to adopt counter-cultural action.
The catch is that most of the available models of subversion, protest, and transformation from the margins to the centres of power, are only a little more meaningful (if that) than most of the available models of trickle down productivity and reform from the centres of power to the margins. Myers wrote his book in 1988, but in 2007 we can see the ways in which the “counter-culture” has, in fact, become “popular culture.” Moreover, we can see how much of the counter-cultural movement has, at its core, not really been counter-cultural at all.
Therefore, Myers' wish for us to examine how the biblical narrative under-girds our action becomes all the more urgent. We cannot simply use Jesus and the prophets as proof-texts for already present models of “nonviolent direct action” (which, by the way, seems to be the mistake that Jim Wallis has fallen into lately). Rather we must allow our study of the biblical narrative to tell us what exactly constitutes counter-cultural activity.
When we engage in this form of bible study, then I suspect that we will discover that celebrating the Eucharist regularly is far more subversive than writing letters to members of parliament, that living in community with one another is a far more meaningful protest than rallying outside the American embassy, that reading the liturgy is far more counter-cultural than reading Adbusters, that suffering alongside of the homeless is more powerful than donating to a soup kitchen, and so on and so forth.

Jesus' critique of the Temple is not strictly economic, legal, or even political — it is eschatological. Economic or political failings would call for reform, legal failings for purification (compare the Maccabean rededication) — they would not necessarily call forth a prophetic sign of judgment and destruction. Jesus' problem with the Temple was rather one of eschatology: the cult as it stood had failed to effect the eschatological event that its sacrifices — in particular, the Passover sacrifice — were supposed to bring about: the forgiveness of Israel's sins and the Return from Exile…
the Temple, which was supposed to be the site where the “forgiveness of Israel's sins” took place, had failed to bring about the eschatological event for which it had been designed: i.e., it had failed to bring about the ingathering of the exiles… As a result with the coming of the Son of Man, it would be destroyed, and the Messianic king would succeed where the Temple had failed.
~ Brant Pitre, Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of Exile: Restoration Eschatology and the Origin of the Atonement, 288, 375-76.
Those who understand Jesus and Paul to be engaging in subversive (and even revolutionary) activity have often pointed out the socio-political and economic implications of Jesus' prophetic actions within (and sayings about) the Jerusalem Temple. Consequently, those Christians today who seek to live subversively, and who have challenged culturally-conditioned forms of Christianity, have used Jesus' criticism of the Temple as a springboard to criticise the socio-political and economic abuses propagated by “mainstream” Western churches.
However, what has been missing in much of this contemporary criticism is that which Pitre argues is at the core of Jesus' critique of the Temple — the eschatological element. Certainly the socio-political and economic elements of Jesus' critique of the Temple should not be dismissed, but they need to be understood in context, and in context these elements must be seen as consequences of the more basic (and fatal) problem: the Temple had not brought about the forgiveness of sins and the end of exile. Because it had not accomplished these things, the Temple actually achieved the opposite goal: it perpetuated exilic conditions by shunning the sick, by oppressing the power, and by supporting death-dealing power structures.
Therefore, those of us today who wish to criticise “mainstream” Western churches cannot simply focus upon the ways in which the “mainstream” Western churches perpetuate exilic conditions by shunning the sick, by oppressing the poor, and by supporting death-dealing power structures. Rather, if we are to get to the core of the problem, we must examine the way in which much of the contemporary Church fails to proclaim the forgiveness of sins and bring about the end of exile. It is this failure that is the fatal flaw of much of the Church — and it is this failure that makes me wonder about the way our churches will be judged when the Son of Man returns.
If we are to truly be God's out-of-exile-people, if we are truly those who possess the eschatological Spirit, if we are to succeed where the Temple failed, and if we hope for vindication when the Son of Man returns, then we must communally embody the proclamation of the forgiveness of sins, and live in such a way that reveals, to both churches and society, that exile is over/ending. Living in this way requires us to rethink much of what we take for granted, indeed, it requires us to rethink all areas of our lives.

In commenting on Jesus' reference to the scribes and Pharisees as “blind guides” (cf. Mt 23), Stanley Hauerwas makes the following point:
They [the scribes and Pharisees] think their task is to make the life of those they lead secure. Yet a people who depend on prophets can never lead lives of security.
Risk-taking, then, becomes the mark of churches that follow the prophetic tradition, which climaxes in the life and death of Jesus. Churches that abandon their security out of their love for God and God's world are those that are faithfully traveling the road of discipleship. Churches that seek to create a space free of suffering, of challenge, or of risk-taking, are churches that are following blind guides.
I remember when I first began to change my thinking about these things. A few years ago, two of my close friends got married and decided that they wanted to begin to enter into a life that was rooted in the margins of society. So, they began to look for a house in the inner-city of Hamilton — i.e. a neighbourhood known for drug use, prostitution, violence, and poverty. As my friends explored this option, they were surprised to discover that Real Estate agents tried to talk them out of moving into the neighbourhood. One agent told them that the bridge just up the road from the house they were looking at was a place known for sexual assaults. Another agent told them that if they wanted to live in this neighbourhood with some sort of sense of security then they should go out and buy some guns.
This was my friends first step into this sort of lifestyle, and it was a big one. Needless to say, they were a little shaken-up by what they were being told. I remember one of them calling me and asking me for advice. A lot of thoughts flew through my mind as we spoke together. Should I advise the husband of a young, beautiful woman to move into a violent neighbourhood that had a reputation for being a place where sexual assaults occurred? Should I tell him that Christians can't own guns? I mean the risks here are real — I have seen, over and over, the devastation that assault can bring into a person's life. Still, even with these things in mind, I encouraged my friends to make the move into the neighbourhood. Love, I had begun to realize, doesn't always mean removing the crosses from the shoulders of my loved ones. Rather, love is helping to sustain them as they carry that cross. Love means carrying crosses together, not walking away from the cross.
So, I suppose my question is this: What are the risks that you and/or your church are taking? If you are not taking risks, then how do you know you are not following blind guides?

Over the years I have remained friends with the Dean of Students from the college that I attended in Toronto. He was both a friend and a mentor to me during my time in Toronto and so I always try to connect with him when I go back that way. A few weeks ago, I was passing through Toronto, and the Dean, knowing of my plans, invited me to give a guest lecture at a course he teaches on Christian community. I spoke rather anecdotally about rooting Christian community on the margins of society, about journeying into places of exile and suffering there, in order to be God's agents of new creation, and about uniting the confessing members of Christ's body with the crucified members of Christ's body — all familiar themes to anybody who as spent any amount of time reading this blog!
The lecture was fairly conversational, and there was actually quite a good amount of dialogue. However, there was one student who kept pressing me with the same question (he was the first student to ask a question and later, after the lecture ended, he approached me and continued to press the issue). This, in essence, was what he was asking:
“Look,” he said, “every now and again, I hear a speaker, like you, talk about the need for Christians to care for the poor and all that. Then they tell stories, like the stories you've told, and I think to myself, 'I'm not doing anything like that.' So my question is this: Should I feel guilty?”
Take a minute to think about how you might respond to that sort of question.
What I said went something like this:
“Well,” I said, “I don't know you and I don't know the first thing about the way in which you live your life, but let's step back for a minute and take a look at the big picture. The themes I am presenting are themes that I believe need to be at the centre of the identity and mission of the people of God. The people of God, as a corporate body, must be involved in this other-centred movement into dark places so that the victory won by Jesus can be made manifest in the here and now. So, when I tell stories about what my community is doing, I am not suggesting that y'all need to go out and start doing precisely what I'm doing. What I'm saying is that the Church needs to exercise a 'preferential option' for the poor that mirrors the heart of God. Thus, you as an individual within the Church, must discover the darkness that God is leading you into. You might not be lead to journey with sexually exploited people and homeless youth… but maybe you are being lead to journey with seniors, or with people with “disabilities,” or with wealthy children who are completely abandoned and unloved by their parents. Or whatever. There are many places of exile still left in our world and the people of God must be moving into all of those places.”
The student was quite dissatisfied with this response. He really didn't want to hear about priorities within the corporate body of Christ. What he wanted to know was, well, if he should feel guilty. I don't know if he had some sort of Evangelical addiction to guilt, or if he wanted me to let him off the hook. Regardless, he asked me again:
“But should I feel guilty?”
And then I realized why I didn't want to answer his question. So I said this:
“Look, I don't want to say if you should feel guilty or not, and here's why. I don't want guilt to be what motivates you. I don't want you to feel guilty that you don't care for the poor, and then go out and start journeying with the poor out of some sense of guilt or duty. That's not what I want at all. What I want is for you to be so overwhelmed by the wonder of God's love that it overflows out of you and leads you naturally to those who are the most desperate for that love, to those who are, literally, dying without it. If guilt is what motivates you, then the chances are that what you do won't be that meaningful, and it probably won't be something you end up doing for any sustained amount of time. But if love is what motivates you, then I think the world will be transformed and you will be able to remain in hard places because you delight in the company of God's beloved — the 'lost sheep' and the 'least of these.'”
The student still looked sort of unhappy but the lecture and the discussion moved on. After the class had ended, he was the first student to approach me.
“I see what you're trying to do,” he said to me, “but should I feel guilty?”

Abundance,not scarcity, is the mark of God's kingdom. Bu that abundance must be made manifest through the lives of a people who have discovered that they can trust God and one another.
~ Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew
In general, the language of “abundance” and “blessedness” puts me on edge. I tend to associate such language with either the “prosperity gospel” that teaches us that God wants us to have more than we already have, or with the upper-middle-class form of Christianity that assures us that God just wants us to be comfortable and enjoy the blessings that our culture affords us. Thus, when I stumbled onto Hauerwas' words about “abundance” in his commentary on Mt 6, I was a little taken aback. Yet Hauerwas was clearly offering a different sort of approach to abundance than the norm. Generally those who talk about “abundance” don't talk about the need to trust one another. After all, from their perspective, abundance is akin to some sort of extravagant autonomy. Sure, they would say, I learn to trust in God, but the abundant life means not having to trust in others for acts of charity.
So what is Hauerwas doing when he combines the notion of “abundance” with the notion of trusting in (and even depending upon!) not only the charity of God, but the charity of others?
Well, Hauerwas is recovering a proper theology of abundance. A proper theology of abundance results in simplicity. Our assertion that abundance is the mark of God's kingdom does not lead us to live extravagantly; rather it leads us to live simply — it leads us to give away, today, all that we have because we are certain that both God, and his people, will provide for tomorrow. We become so certain of God's overflowing abundance that, instead of grasping and hording, we end up living lives that are increasingly free of the possessions and securities that are, in fact, the marks of worldly kingdoms.

Barbara Ehrenreich has recently written an interesting editorial entitled “Pathologies of Hope” (cf. Harper's, Feb '07). It begins in this way:
I hate hope. It was hammered into me constantly a few years ago when I was being treated for breast cancer: Think positively! Don't lose hope! … Hope? What about a cure? At antiwar and labor rallies over the years I have dutifully joined Jesse Jackson in chanting “Keep hope alive!”—all the while crossing my fingers and thinking, “Fuck hope. Keep us alive.”
Ehrenreich then devotes the rest of the article to describing, and thoroughly rejecting, the popular American “Cult of Positivity” which is rooted in the marketing of “the power of positive thinking,” “optimisim,” and “positive psychology.” The major problem with this Cult is, according to Ehrenreich, the way in which Positivity requires faith. She writes:
It's not enough to manifest positivity through a visibly positive attitude; you must establish it as one of the very structures of your mind, whether or not it is justified by the actual circumstances.
This then results in the irrationality of “positive illusions,” for this sort of faith is rooted in a denial of that which is actual. Furthermore, Ehrenreich argues that this has ethical consequences because “the ubiquitous moral injunction to think positively may place an additional burden on the already sick or otherwise aggrieved.” This results in “victim-blaming at its cruelest” and produces a culture that is “less and less tolerant of people having a bad day or a bad year” (this is a quote that Ehrenreich takes from Barbara Held).
Therefore, following in the footsteps of Camus, Ehrenreich argues that we must be realistic, but not passive or unhappy. Rather, she concludes:
To be hope-free is to acknowledge the lion in the tall grass, the tumor in the CAT scan, and to plan one's moves accordingly.
Like Ehrenreich, I have been inspired by Camus' writings. It is the compassionate atheism of Camus, and not the vitriolic atheism of Richard Dawkins, that I find both coherent and inspiring. Therefore, as I reflect upon this article, let me begin by saying that I whole-heartedly agree with Ehrenreich's critique of the “Cult of Positivity” that exists in America. This “Cult” is premised upon a denial of reality that is, indeed, pathological, and this pathology does genuinely result in “victim-blaming” and what Ehrenreich calls an “empathy deficit.” Thus, Ehrenreich's desire to continue to be active while also acknowledging “the lion in the tall grass” is quite commendable.
However, IMHO, the fundamental flaw in Ehrenreich's article is the way in which she equates “hope” with “positivity.” It is interesting to note that the language of “hope” is rarely employed in the body of this article, and, of the ten references to “hope,” all but two appear in the first and last paragraphs. Ehrenreich simply equates “hope” with “positivity” (the language of “positivity” and “negativity” is employed fifty-five times in the article). Yet Christians can never equate hope with the sort of positivity that is founded upon the denial of very real, and often very terrible, circumstances. Rather, as both Jurgen Moltmann (cf. Theology of Hope) and Jacques Ellul (cf. Hope in Time of Abandonment) have shown, hope can only be genuine when it is rooted honestly and unflinchingly in the darkest places of our world. Indeed, I suspect that Ehrenreich would have a very different perspective on “hope” if she began to read the writings of those like Moltmann and Ellul who stand within long-lasting traditions of suffering and hope, rather than simply allowing hope to be defined by “positive psychologists,” motivational speakers, and self-help gurus. The “Cult of Positivity” is a perversion of hope — and its pathological consequences have nothing at all to do with hope.
Here it is helpful to pick up on the connection Ehrenreich makes with Camus and the notion of living honestly. As we (in the company of Camus) try to honestly examine the situation that we are in, it is helpful to re-examining the theological motif of “hell.” Many theologians have argued that “hell” is not a place of eternal torture; rather hell is the experience of godforsakenness — hell is where God is not. Thus, Camus' “refusal to hope,” is an appropriate expression of his view of the world as godless. Following in the footsteps of Dante, Camus urges us to abandon hope if we are to truly enter into our world. Consequently, the problem with the Cult of Positivity, is that it tries to deny the godlessness of our world — it wants us to call our hells, “heavens.” But our hells are not heavens and so, if we are honest, we are bound to pick Camus over the positive psychologists.
However, what I find inspiring about Moltmann and Ellul is that they, like Camus, do not deny the very real hells of our world. Based upon their faith — in a lord who died as one forsaken by God — they argue that, even in the midst of hell, God is to be found in solidarity with the godforsaken. This then becomes the foundation of a hope that does not flee from reality, but acknowledges “the lion in the tall grass.” Perhaps there is more than the lion hidden there. This hope is not a placebo that removes suffering; rather it is that which sustains us in the midst of suffering.
Thus, it is the affirmation of this sort of hope that has lead me into deeper and deeper levels of empathy with those whose sufferings are ignored by others. While the Cult of Positivity does indeed result in an “empathy deficit,” genuine hope leads us into ever deeper solidarity with those who live in the hells of our world. In response to the Cult of Positivity, hope says “Fuck Positivity. Keep us alive.”
In my journey with homeless youth, drug addicts, and sexually exploited people, I have often encountered the lion — but I have also encountered something that is greater than the lion. The discovery of god in the heart of godless places puts a whole different face on hope.